This guy does not care. He gives you expert-level dense readings on a VERY abstract field with little to no context. Your whole grade is 2 10 page papers on these readings. During the pandemic/riots/protests, many professors turned their finals to "no harm" for students. Friedkin said he's not "comfortable" with that. TA was a lifesaver tho. 0/10

Doesn't really care about students, only cares about his "comfort" 10% of class showed for lectures. Lectures are dry and make no sense. Avoid

Prof. Friedkin was an interesting teacher. The 1st couple of days are intimidating, but they scare off the students who may not want to cont. with the class. 4 papers, each 100 points. I received B's on all of them; ranging 85-87. Attend class to take notes from the prof. then add those notes into paper. Helps a lot! TA is super helpful.

very heavy on papers 100 pts each & the class is 300 points in total & they were all based on readings so going to class was not mandatory. The TA for W17 basically gave everyone a B in all the papers, which pissed me off considering how hard I worked on all of it and how often I went to her office hours. overall, sweet professor, mediocore TA.

Class is based on 3 papers, you have plenty of time to do them all but the readings (empirical articles) are so dense and entirely what the papers are based on. The last paper incorporates lecture. All lectures are online, but the papers are just really hard to get through and are time consuming.

the class is just midterm/final. grading is super easy. he is an awesome prof who is very absorbed in this field. Most of lecture is based on his own theories and experiments which makes it cooler to hear him talk about

I love sociology but this was the worse sociology class I have ever taken. Lectures were irreverent and boring. Essays had strange unclear prompts. Readings were very dense. I feel bad for anyone who takes this class.

Professor Friedkin is an expert on social networks. People say his classes are confusing because they may be too busy texting on their phones. After taking SOC148MA, I'm seriously thinking about specializing in this field.

Lecture is painfully boring. Grade is only based on long essays based on reading. On the bright side you can skip lecture because its fairly irrelevant.

The lectures are sort of long & slow but the material was great! He does a great job at explaining the concepts but you will need to read to understand what is going on. There were papers due every 2 weeks (Average about 6-10pgs each so be prepared to work.) The final was a 15 page paper, but if you keep up with the reading you'll write up to 18

I did not learn anything.

do not take this class!!! it was sooo awful. I thought the topic would be interesting about networks but it was so terrible. He made no sense. Grade was based on midterm paper (10-15 pages) and final paper (10-15 pages)--the prompts were ridiculous and he didn't care to help the students! SOOO AWFUL! WORST CLASS I'VE EVER TAKEN AT UCSB!